1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to wireless communication. More particularly, the present invention relates to reducing audio latency in wireless communications.
2. Background Art
Wireless communications permeate modern social interaction throughout most of the world. Characteristically, wireless communications are much quicker and less expensive to implement, and so they often form the basis for any contemporary contract for communication infrastructure. For example, critical emergency infrastructure typically relies on wireless communications to quickly and effectively respond to crises that may hamper communications using more terrestrial means, such as wired communications, or actual immediate presence. Moreover, wireless communications increasingly play an important part in world politics, where, for example, the realistic reproduction of a single voice communicated wirelessly to the population of a country can motivate millions.
As such, systems for wireless communications involving audio, and especially speech, typically become more desirable as they become more able to reproduce realistic sounds and circumstances. For example, with respect to reproducing realistic sounds, the realistic reproduction of a human voice can facilitate an emergency response based on stress detected in a voice, or under other circumstances, can simply facilitate better communication by incorporating more nuance and audio fidelity. With respect to realistic circumstances, interactivity between two speakers, for example, is much enhanced when a discussion can be had without constant perceptible pauses due to latencies injected by the type of wireless communication system used.
Unfortunately, using conventional methods, increasing one type of realism typically reduces the other. For example, the use of wideband audio for wireless communications, such as wideband speech, which attempts to increase the fidelity of audio communicated between devices, may increase audio latency by increasing bandwidth requirements or, alternatively, by requiring an audio encoding and decoding process that can introduce its own additional latency due to interface effects, particularly in conventional modularized communication systems.
Accordingly, there is a need to overcome the drawbacks and deficiencies in the art by providing systems and methods for wireless communications that substantially reduce or eliminate associated audio latency.